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Sampling Rap, Salsa and Al Jazeera

Her singular style has made the D.J. Venus X in demand with fashion designers and art galleries. At right, working a Museum of Modern Art party.Credit
From left: Emily Berl for The New York Times, PatrickMcMullan.com

AT a party last fall celebrating Terry Richardson’s photography exhibition “Mom & Dad” at the Westway, a former strip joint turned nightclub in the far West Village, the D.J. Venus X blasted through a torrent of disparate musical styles during her two-hour-plus set: Chicago juke (a low-fi interpretation of break beat); Dominican dembow (a Latin spin on reggaetón); local underground rap; South Africa house music; Spanish salsa; Turkish techno.

By the time she played the hit “We Found Love” by Rihanna, the crowd was soaked with sweat. And just as the song was about to reach its climax, she unexpectedly looped the soaring crescendo on repeat, then stopped the track entirely before starting dubstep, the latest electronica hybrid to go mainstream.

“I thought there was going to be a riot,” said the artist Richard Phillips, who was there, along with the designer Cynthia Rowley and the downtown gadabout Aaron Bondaroff. “It was one of the best parties I have ever been to in my life.”

It is disruptive moments like these that Venus X, born Jazmin Venus Soto, thrives on. “I do sampling, chopping-and-screwing live and remixing on the spot, so if something is playing the crowd likes, I will interrupt it heavily to break apart the process of continuity,” Ms. Soto, 25, said in a recent interview from her closet-size room at the Marrakech Hotel on Broadway and 102nd Street.

She was gingerly burning an assortment of MP3s onto blank CDs (“they’re more tactile than an iPod,” she said) for a private party in honor of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings to be given by the Gagosian Gallery later that evening. (Also of concern was what to wear to such an occasion: “a purple fur necklace that kind of looks like a neck brace” or an outfit from the East Village boutique Vampire Freaks?)

Not since DJ Spooky, an experimental turntablist whose work first spilled over to the worlds of film, literature and art in the 1990s (he was featured in a Whitney Biennial), has a D.J. been appreciated in so many cultural contexts.

Last September, Ms. Soto went on tour with the experimental rock band Gang Gang Dance and performed a live set during the Fashion Week show for Gerlan Jeans, a label known for its macabre club-kid wear. In December, she provided the soundtrack for several events at Art Basel Miami, including a pool party given by the artist Mickalene Thomas. That same month, she was also working out the logistics of an illegal rave at an empty warehouse space she had been tipped off about in the Bronx.

“If a cop comes, you offer them money — or you hire an off-duty cop to protect you,” Ms. Soto said.

She has been the warm-up act for the dapper rapper Theophilus London, collaborated with the austere men’s wear designer Patrik Ervell and done parties for Phillip Lim and the Museum of Modern Art.

“She’s a tastemaker, but she’s raw,” said Mr. London, a Trinidad native who grew up in Brooklyn and has known Ms. Soto since childhood. “She’s been out there on the streets figuring it all out for as long as I can remember. She understands culture — all of it.”

Ms. Soto is a first-generation American born to a Dominican mother and an Ecuadorean father. She grew up in Washington Heights and says that she learned to leapfrog different demographics at an early age. “My worldview is the result of all the stuff that went down in the city in the ’80s and ’90s,” she said, including one day, she said, when she and her brother had to dodge gunfire on the way to school.

Photo

Jazmin Venus Soto, the D.J. known as Venus X, weaves newscasts into her mashups.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

Ms. Soto credited an ex-boyfriend for teaching her how to D.J., and mentions a book she borrowed from a recent ex-girlfriend in the next breath. She cited both the black-power meetings she attended as a teenager and the bubble-gum feminism of the Spice Girls as ideological influences.

She is also a dexterous street-style chameleon, describing her wardrobe as “freakish cosplay,” short for costume play, “mixed with goth and the hood.” During the day, this might mean baggy pants and a halter top that suggests a ’90s raver; at night, a sprayed-on leopard miniskirt with a cropped pink jacket that wouldn’t look out of place on the rapper Lil’ Kim; a white T-shirt and Timberland boots when visiting her extended family (“they’re deeply Catholic”). She also constantly alters the color and style of her hair, which for six months was a shade of green that resembled oxidized copper (it is now back to black).

Ms. Soto first drew attention in the art/fashion/music/night-life nexus through GHE20GOTH1K (pronounced “Ghetto Gothic”), a party she hosts alongside her best friend, Shayne Oliver, who designs the label Hood by Air, and the producer Physical Therapy.

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It began at the Beauty Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, then bounced over to the Gallery Bar on the Lower East Side as well as a handful of undisclosed locations (like a sweltering hot basement across the street from a tortilla manufacturer in Bushwick).

Within a year, GHE20GOTH1K was widely recognized as reanimating New York’s underground night life. It was one of the few parties where a wide cross section of the city — gay and straight, black and white, goths, punks, hip-hop heads, artists, music snobs, fashion designers like Mr. Ervell and even the occasional celebrity like Diplo — came to dance under one roof. Ms. Soto said she views D.J.-ing for such a diverse audience as a defiantly political act, and frequently peppers sound clips from the Al Jazeera news network, audio from the riots in Egypt and sound pings from submarines into her sets.

“I’m going to play Al Jazeera in the club, and you’re going to like it,” she said. “And it’s going to be cool, but not weird cool. It’s going to be like Kanye West and Jay-Z cool.”

Ms. Soto said she gets many of her samples and international beats from the Web: culling noises from the depths of YouTube, music forums, direct messages from her online creative community, and a miscellany of international MP3-sharing sites. This often means the quality of the tracks she plays can seem muddled and distorted, the aural equivalent of a pixelated clip.

In a phone interview, Lauren Cornell, an adjunct curator at the New Museum, where Ms. Soto will perform at a benefit next month, said: “Venus responds to how stratified night-life culture can be, and it’s something she tries to break down. I think that by putting politics at the forefront of her music, she is breaking people out of their expectations of what they typically hear on a dance floor. It’s getting them to be a little more self-conscious to what they’re listening to, where it comes from and how they’re processing it.”

Ms. Soto seems determined as well to preserve her independence. She said a representative for a major recording artist approached her about a deal, but that after a series of back-and-forths, she turned down the offer and is instead releasing a mix tape herself online later this year.

“A lot of the specifics of her taste may be somewhat far-reaching for the mainstream,” said Matthew Schnipper, the editor in chief of The Fader. “I can understand how to industry players it’s appealing: ‘Wow, look at this woman doing something really diverse in the realm of world music — let’s try to bottle that up.’ ”

To someone who hasn’t heard Ms. Soto, it can be hard to define her craft. Is she a D.J. and party promoter with an eclectic style? An artist who recalls the lineage of “sonic awareness” pioneers like Pauline Oliveros and Christian Marclay? An agitprop provocateur like M.I.A. and Santogold?